A hitherto little-explored facet of the celebrated Mexican painter Frida Kahlo will be the object of an exhibition at New York’s Botanical Garden presenting the intimate links which the artist maintained with the world of plants. The event, “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life”, will run from 16 May to 1 November 2015.

The exhibition will reconstitute the garden which Frida created together with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, at their house in Coyoacán (Mexico City), the ‘Casa Azul’ (Blue House), which today houses the Frida Kahlo Museum. It will reproduce the blue hues of the patio and the artist’s studio, and will present a collection of Mexican plants as in the original garden. On show will be a total of 14 works by Frida Kahlo (12 paintings and 2 drawings), among them a self-portrait from 1940 with a background of vegetation and the “Portrait of Luther Burbank” (1931), which depicts a figure half human, half plant. There will also be a recital of poems by Octavio Paz, a film festival and an exhibition of Mexican cuisine.

The organiser, Adriana Zavala, sees the exhibition as presenting a new way of seeing Frida, going beyond her personal life. Recalling that the books on Kahlo tend to concentrate on her biography, her love relations and her health, she stresses that this event has the potential to open doors, for ‘there are certainly new things to say and to study about Frida Kahlo’.